Hi all,
Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from different part of the world have different names/terms for the same object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why we want to have ONE zh: only.
We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical assistance).
I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this problem are in vain.
Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
Regards Lorenzarius